Translation and Localization Challenges in Modern Advertising: the English-Russian Case

Nowadays in connection with globalization almost all international corporations promote and spread their products to many foreign countries. To boost the demand for these products a company needs a marketing strategy, which always includes a particular advertising message, in other words, a slogan. The professional creative approach is essential for translating these concise texts due to problems, which might appear during its cultural adaptation or localization to other languages. In my research, I will focus on the procedure of translation and adaptation of original English versions of slogans in Russian. The purpose of the study is to define the main challenges which emerge in the process of translation and localization of commercial texts and to illustrate translation techniques by specific examples. To achieve the objective of the paper, several research methods will be applied: theoretical analysis of slogan’s linguistic characteristics and its functions, and comparative analysis of English advertising texts and their Russian equivalents. It is expected that structural differences between languages and their cultural linguistic traditions will be a major translation and adaptation challenge.